Wednesday, August 4, 2010

Wine vs Native - 3D Performance Benchmarks

In the past I've done Wine on Linux versus native Windows 7 benchmarks for 3D applications. Source engine games are some of my favorite benchmarking applications. Since Valve ported Steam to OSX earlier this year and I recently acquired an OSX PC I figured this would be an opportune time to see how Wine performance measures up to a native client, not only on the same hardware - but on the same operating system.

My benchmarking tools this time around will be Counter Strike: Source and Team Fortress 2, as they both run native on OSX. For Wine software I used the recently released Crossover Games 9.1

Scores:
Counter Strike: Source
  • 1680x1050, Wine - 44.16fps
  • 800x600, Wine - 48.59fps
  • 1680x1050, Native - 54.02fps
  • 800x600, Native - 56.22fps
Team Fortress 2
  • 1680x1050, Wine - 43.88fps
  • 800x600, Wine - 49.58fps
  • 1680x1050, Native - 50.56fps
  • 800x600, Native - 58.47fps
As you can see - the numbers are fairly close (at least closer than they are with the Windows vs Linux Wine benchmarks). With CSS Wine scored 81% the speed of the native version and in TF2 Wine was 86% the FPS native version. It is fantastic the progress the Wine project has made over the past few years, to the point where it can almost keep up with a native version of modern games - even so I would love to see native ports of these games to my favorite operating system.

~Jeff Hoogland
Please note while these benchmark scores presented are accurate to the best of my abilities, they only represent my personal hardware and software configurations. Your results on your own system(s) may vary (and if they do, please share them!).

6 comments:

  1. Nice Post Mr. Hoogland.
    Best Regards from Brazil
    A

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  2. If you test the native Windows versions of these games on the same PC you will notice that they have severely higher FPS than the native Mac versions.
    It's not that Wine is on par with native code, but that the Mac natives are slower than the Windows ones.

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  3. @Ivan I'm aware (check here - http://jeffhoogland.blogspot.com/2010/01/wine-cxgames-and-windows-7-performance.html) What this does point out though is that the limitation appears to be within the operating system/video drivers itself and not the fault of Wine software though.

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  4. I wish Linux and Unix based systems in general would get as much attention from companies like Nvidia, AMD, and Adobe.

    Although with WINE and on the odd occasion virtual machines I've managed to stay in Linux for months.

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  5. This comment has been removed by the author.

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  6. @Chris: Including nVidia in your list is a bit deceiving. nVidia has always had stellar support for Linux and Unix. AMD (ATI) on the other hand, has put out drivers that are consistently behind the curve of X.org development and simply do not work in modern Linuces.

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